*
“These are shift reports,” said Gamache. “From a company called Aqueduct. They’re thirty years old. Why’re you looking at them?”
“I was following a trail. A name popped up in another file and I followed it here.”
“What name?” Gamache asked.
“Pierre Arnot.”
“Show me.” Gamache leaned in and Nichol scrolled down. Gamache put on his glasses and scanned the pages. There were lots of names. It appeared to be work schedules and soil reports and things called loads. “I don’t see it.”
“Neither did I,” admitted Nichol. “But it’s associated with this file.”
“Maybe it’s another Pierre Arnot,” said Jér?me from his desk. “It’s not an uncommon name.”
Gamache hummed to show he’d heard, but his attention was taken by the file. There was no actual mention of any Arnot.
“How could his name be attached to this file, but not appear in it?” Gamache asked.
“It could be hidden,” said Nichol. “Or an outside reference. Like your name might be attached to a file on balding, or licorice pipes.”
Gamache glanced at Jér?me, who’d given a snort.
Still, he understood. Arnot’s name didn’t need to appear in the file to be somehow associated with it. Somewhere down the line, there was a connection.
“Keep going,” said the Chief, and got up.
*
“Charpentier’s very good at what he does,” Tessier reassured Francoeur over the phone. He too was dressed and ready for work. As he’d put on his socks he’d realized that when he took them off that night, everything would have changed. His world. The world. Certainly Québec. “If he says it’s nothing, then that’s what it was.”
“No.” The Chief Superintendent wanted to be convinced, to be reassured. But he wasn’t. “There’s something wrong. Call Lambert. Get her in.”
“Yessir.” Tessier hung up and dialed Chief Inspector Lambert, the head of Cyber Crimes.
*
Gamache stirred the embers with a fresh log, making more room, then he shoved it in and put the cast-iron cap back on.
“Agent Nichol,” he said after a few moments. “Can you look up that company?”
“What company?”
“Aqueduct.” He walked across to her. “Where you followed Pierre Arnot.”
“But he never showed up. It must’ve been another Arnot or a coincidental contact. Something not very significant.”
“Maybe, but please find out what you can about Aqueduct.” He was leaning over her, one hand on the desk, the other on the back of her chair.
She huffed, and the screen she was looking at flew away. A few clicks later and images of old Roman bridges and water systems leapt onto the monitor. Aqueducts.
“Satisfied?” she demanded.
“Scroll down,” he said, and he studied the list of references to “Aqueduct.”
There was a company that studied sustainability. There was a band by that name.
They went through a few pages, but the information became less and less relevant.
“Can I go back now?” asked Nichol, weary of amateurs.
Gamache stared at the screen, still feeling uneasy. But he nodded.
*
The full shift was called in and every desk and monitor in the Cyber Crimes division had an agent at it.
“But, ma’am,” Charpentier was appealing to his boss, “it was a ghost. I’ve seen thousands of them—so have you. I took a good look, just to be sure. Ran all the security scans. Nothing.”
Lambert turned from her shift commander to the Chief Superintendent.
Unlike Charpentier, Chief Inspector Lambert knew how critical the next few hours would be. The firewalls, the defenses, the software programs she herself had helped design needed to be impenetrable. And they were.
But Francoeur’s concern had transferred itself to her. And now she wondered.
“I’ll make sure myself, sir,” she said to Francoeur. He held her eyes, staring at her for so long, and so intently, that both Tessier and Charpentier exchanged glances.
Finally Francoeur nodded.
“I want your people to not just guard, do you understand? I want them to go looking.”
“For what?” Charpentier asked, exasperated.
“For intruders,” snapped Francoeur. “I want you to hunt down whoever might be out there. If there’s someone trying to get in, I want you to find them, whether they’re a raccoon or a ghost or an army of the undead. Got it?”
“Got it, sir,” said Charpentier.
*
Gamache reappeared at Nichol’s elbow.
“I made a mistake,” he said right into her ear.
“How?” She didn’t look at him but continued to concentrate on what she was doing.
“You said it yourself, the file was old. That means Aqueduct was an old company. It might not exist anymore. Can you find it in archives?”
“But if it doesn’t exist how can it matter?” asked Nichol. “Old file, old company, old news.”
“Old sins have long shadows,” said Gamache. “And this is an old sin.”
“More fucking quotes,” mumbled Nichol under her breath. “What does it even mean?”
“It means, what started small three decades ago might have grown,” said the Chief, not looking at Agent Nichol, but reading her screen. “Into something…”
He looked at Nichol’s face, so flat, so repressed.
“… big,” he finally said. But the word that had actually come to mind was “monstrous.”
“We’ve found the shadow.” Gamache turned back to the screen. “Now it’s time to find the sin.”
“I still don’t understand,” she muttered, but Gamache suspected that wasn’t true. Agent Yvette Nichol knew a great deal about old sins. And long shadows.
“This’ll take a few minutes,” she said.
Gamache joined Superintendent Brunel, who was standing by the window looking at her husband, clearly longing to watch over his shoulder.
“How’s Jér?me doing?”
“Fine, I suppose,” she said. “I think tripping that alarm shook him. It came earlier than he expected. But he recovered.”
Gamache looked at the two people seated at their desks. It was almost seven thirty in the morning. Six hours since they’d begun.
He walked over to Jér?me. “Would you like to stretch your legs?”
Dr. Brunel didn’t answer at once. He stared at the screen, his eyes following a line of code.